Tuesday Trivia and Open Thread

"Ceremony" - Dean Wareham

- Oscar, Oscar, Oscar - Roy has his way with the Zhdanovites of the right concerning the Academy Awards last night, but it's worth noting that the desire for propaganda is hardly the exclusive province of our right wing brethren.  Witness this trashing of Argo -- the movie is "reprehensible" -- evidently because it was not a documentary of U.S. perfidy in the 1953 coup that toppled Mohammad Mosaddeq.  And this one spreads the hate not only for Argo, but for Lincoln (which focuses far too much on the 16th President at the expense of Black abolitionists) -- not to mention Zero Dark Thirty.  I just keep thinking of the tag line to one of the horror films of the 1970s -- "it's only a movie, it's only a movie."  

- As for the ceremony itself, I wasn't too impressed.  I have a pretty broad and irreverent sense of humor, but Seth McFarlane is only funny if you have an IQ of about 100.  He's a smarmy, smug, self-satisfied mediocrity who seems to think boob jokes are cutting edge and daring stuff.  Oddly enough, I also think having the orchestra cut people off so quickly takes away some of the interest in the program.  I'd cut out a chunk of the awards (sorry sound guys) and loosen things up a bit.

- I assume that the right wing reaction to Michelle Obama's presentation of the Best Picture award is going to be worth at least a two-part series for Roy.

- And now, back to Washington's version of show business.  This post on No More Mister Nice Blog pretty much sums up the manner in which our elite media is so horrible and so inadequate to the challenges to truth and sanity posed by today's GOP.  Incidentally, for those of you concerned that Ezra Klein might be becoming a "courtier" I thought his absolute dismantling of David Brooks the other day was a reassuring sign to the contrary.   What was amazing to me is that I don't think Brooks had any idea that he had just been gutted in public.  God, he's a dumbass.

- Does anyone remember "Mission Accomplished?

Jump in.

Comments

[low-tech cyclist]

SC - yeah, that was the first thing I thought of too, when I saw Boehner's ridiculous accusation.

I think Ezra will be nice to people like Brooks and Mike Allen to the extent that the facts will allow, but when, in the words of Tevye, there is no 'other hand,' he's too committed to the facts to let them be run roughshod over.

I ignored the Oscars for the 59th straight year.

[nancy]

Oscar, Oscar, Oscar

'Who the hell is this guy?' was all I could think as I wandered in and out of earshot, while making dinner. A Guardian response.

Misogyny-comic. And person whose *rise* to fame was missed by many of us. I see bag-over-head well into his future.

***

I well remember "Mission Accomplished" -- my neighbor's son-in-law was the flight captain on that crew and they were returning from six months at sea, an extended duty. Bush swooped in to take the bow. It was so disgusting.

***

So. Did the Senate "get off its ass" today? [This is one impressive sentence here -- we can do this in English!]

[nancy]

"Mission Accomplished." Wiki indicates that the flight crew and carrier were returning from a ten-month deployment, not six -- the longest since Vietnam -- making Bush's suited-up swaggering even more awful.

[Crissa]

McFarlane is a great writer, but he needs a strong editor. It's too easy to lose the message you want to get out for the words you use. To make a joke go on too long. To explain too much when showing is more powerful. And I hope if anything this is the peak of this, and we stop airing this crap without thinking 'gosh, maybe this sounds like we're treating people like shit'? *sigh*

[nancy]

McFarlane is a great writer

Crissa. Wow. I sure must have missed something big. Great? Must be a generational huge burp-gap.

I'll go with this:

People find different things funny. But there comes a point in an evening when you realise you just watched a man joke to more than a billion people about the time a 20-year-old woman was beaten to unconsciousness and sung about all the boobs he has seen in various movie rape scenes. At that point you find yourself stooping to MacFarlane's level and the only thing to say is – you know what? This guy is just an asshole

[Crissa]

Great writers - or any artists - have tons of ideas. Many, perhaps most, should remain on the cutting room floor, never to be recycled.

[low-tech cyclist]

Bob Woodward, via Benen:

"Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying 'Oh, by the way, I can't do this because of some budget document?'" Woodward said Wednesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

"Or George W. Bush saying, 'You know, I'm not going to invade Iraq because I can't get the aircraft carriers I need' or even Bill Clinton saying, 'You know, I'm not going to attack Saddam Hussein's intelligence headquarters,' as he did when Clinton was president because of some budget document?" Woodward added. "Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the president going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement, I can't do what I need to do to protect the country. That's a kind of madness that I haven't seen in a long time."

It would have fit right in if he'd added:

"Or can you imagine Richard Nixon sitting there and saying 'Oh, by the way, I can't have the CIA tell the FBI not to investigate the Watergate burglars' money trail, giving the trumped-up justification that national security is involved, just because some silly statute says it would be obstruction of justice?'"

If the Bob Woodward of today were to find himself back in 1972, he'd be kissing Nixon's ass, rather than bringing him down.

[oddjob]

Truth.

It's what he's been doing ever since about 1980 or so.

[Crissa]

I'm enjoying Jonathan Bernstein's on again off again column about watergate on his home blog at http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/ (Which I thought was in the side bar here...). This stuff happened before I was born, so seeing how slowly it played out minus the media frenzy is interesting.

But I'm kinda a sucker for things being doled out slowly. My SO watches entire seasons in a sitting; I save each episode so I watch no more than one per series per day, stretching it over weeks or months.

[low-tech cyclist]

Scalia has pretty much stopped bothering with any judicial standards at all. It's like having your retired uncle, the one who watches Fox and listens to Rush Limbaugh all day, on the Supreme Court, voting his prejudices and gut feelings.

[oddjob]

seeing how slowly it played out minus the media frenzy is interesting

The way it drip, drip, dripped was painfully dull to my 8th & 9th grader self. It seemed to me from the summer of 1972 (when John Dean testified to the Senate) that this was really bad, and that the president was criminally involved. I kept wondering when it was going to be over, and whether Nixon was going to be brought to be held to account.

I also think it damaged the presidency and the government in a very lasting way.

[kathy a.]

oddjob -- yes, it did damage the presidency and government in lasting ways. and the current GOP learned absolutely zero, zip, nada from that, in terms of really cleaning things up and looking out for the nation's interests. (i know, the "nation's intersts" sounds so communist or something...)

all they want now is to assign blame to the other side -- which, excuse me, is not governance.

[nancy]

Personally I was ready to impeach Scalia after the *duck-hunting with my VP pal and GOP buddies* incident. But now, what the hell is this person up to? Return to Jim Crow? Disdain, and disregard for judicial standards, not to mention civil rights.

I remember the John Bircher billboards on the backroads of southern Ohio: 'Impeach Earl Warren' adjacent to 'Get out of the U.N.' I think it's time for a more legitimate front lawn sign and window banner campaign, across the country, to impeach our black-robed egomaniac. "De-frock Scalia."

[low-tech cyclist]

The United States Constitution, Amendment XV:

SECTION 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

SECTION 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

What legal reasoning, exactly, does the apparent Supreme Court majority hang an overturning of the Voting Rights Act on?

The only wiggle room at all is the word 'appropriate' and I would think that would have to be defined quite expansively, as in, can one draw any sort of plausible connection between the purpose of the Amendment and the apparent intent of the legislation.

After all, the language of Section 2 of the 15th Amendment is also part of a number of other Constitutional amendments (13th, 14th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, 26th), and if the Supreme Court has wide latitude to decide what 'appropriate' means for one such Amendment, it would have to have that same latitude for all Amendments using that language, and that would pretty much turn the Supreme Court into a super-legislature with the right to second-guess any legislation intended to enforce any of that group of Amendments.

Has the Supreme Court previously ruled on the meaning of 'appropriate' or is the current Court taking the first crack at it? The latter seems unlikely to me, but you never know.

[oddjob]

More info. & analysis about sequestration and budget battles.

[low-tech cyclist]

The wingnuts need a too-good-to-be-true-ometer.

That is, they need an inner sense that some news item fits their beliefs and prejudices, especially about those they dislike or oppose, a little bit too well, and causes them to say, "hey, wait a minute..." rather than passing it along uncritically.

Of course, when you're an ideologue, such skepticism just isn't part of your makeup. So I guess it's too much to expect.

[low-tech cyclist]

I see the Violence Against Women Act (the real one, not the watered-down substitute) passed the House today, so it's a done deal. All that's needed is Obama's signature, and that'll happen as soon as a signing ceremony with appropriate witnesses can be organized.

[nancy]

VAWA -- And Cantor still voted "No". Some nonsense about tribal police jurisdiction concerns. Right.

“He’s a fantastic Majority Leader,” Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a close friend, said. “Eric keeps the trains running on time very efficiently.” As Mitt Romney’s former running mate and the architect of the budget policies that some Republicans blame for their loss in 2012, Ryan is well aware of his party’s problems. “What Eric is really focussed on is that we need to do a better job of broadening our appeal and showing that we have real ideas and solutions that make people’s lives better,” Ryan said. “Eric is the guy who studies the big vision and is doing the step-by-step, daily management of the process to get us there. That is a huge job.”

Ryan Lizza has the report on the full Cantor at the New Yorker .

[oddjob]

Someday, if Ryan's lucky enough, he'll finally realize that the ideas they have make people's lives worse.

[nancy]

Oddjob, Indeed.

Also I found it supremely strange, but I guess not surprising, that Ryan would use the phrase about keeping the "trains running on time" -- appearing to know nothing of the origin or context of the thing. Praising his Jewish colleague. Ay. Shaking head time. :-/

[low-tech cyclist]

The idea that they "have real ideas and solutions that make people’s lives better" is laughable. Because solutions solve problems, and the only problems they care about are that the rich have to pay taxes, and that corporations have to adhere to regulations.